The company has also added the new Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Compact to its Open Device program, one that ensures that developers can run open-source versions of Android on Sony Xperia devices.

If you're a regular user, and not a developer who wants to try his luck at creating Android 6.0 Marshmallow ROMs for Sony Xperia devices, then what you need to know is that Sony has started working on Android 6.0 Marshmallow updates for some of its devices. Unfortunately, not all of Sony Xperia family members will be officially updated to the new Android version, which is where the importance of Sony's Open Device program comes into play.

Posts: 778; Member since: Oct 17, 2012

posted on Oct 12, 2015, 10:53 PM 0

Posts: 240; Member since: Oct 11, 2014

This is nothing new. Sony always does this. The bad part is that if you buy an Xperia from a cellular carrier 99% of the time the bootloader is locked, cannot be unlocked, and never will be (See Xperia devices from T-Mobile, Verizon, etc) so you can never flash custom ROMs. All you can do is root the device.

posted on Oct 13, 2015, 5:08 AM 2

Posts: 1168; Member since: Oct 05, 2015

Amen. I buy all my phones no contract, and within 1-1.5 years of paying $23-29 for unlimited everything, I've paid for my phone in savings and I own it and don't have to worry about early cancelation fees, risks against credit, contracts, etc.
Then again, the phone carrier and subsidizing model is the prime reason iPhone is so popular. Can you imagine if people had to buy these things outright?

Posts: 525; Member since: Jan 17, 2011

posted on Oct 13, 2015, 1:39 AM 0

Posts: 240; Member since: Oct 11, 2014

You can back up the partition that stores the DRM keys and restore it after you unlock the bootloader and flash your custom ROM. That way, the camera and various other things work as intended. You can do that on non-carrier Xperias. Carrier Xperias like at T-Mobile and Verizon versions, you can't even unlock the bootloader, at all, whatsoever, its something the carrier themselves do with the phone. It's been a year since Z3 came to T-Mobile and no one can unlock the bootloader. Someone claimed bounty for discovering an exploit to root it even with the locked bootloader but that's all you can do to it and if you can't flash custom ROMs then rooting is virtually useless, which is why I got rid of mine.

posted on Oct 13, 2015, 2:25 AM 1

Posts: 1168; Member since: Oct 05, 2015

Well, I wouldn't go so far as saying rooting is useless. With a rooted phone, you can manually remove all the bloatware from your phone, control startup events and when apps can wake your phone, you can control cpu/gpu frequency, cpu governor behavior, wake/sleep profiles, etc. My bootloader is locked, and I have a custom ROM on my Z3C. You just have to wait a bit longer if you want ROMs on a LB device...

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